Dicing with the Dangerous Lord

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‘Your performance the other night was excellent.’

She seemed to still and, for a moment, he saw the flicker of confusion and a slight underlying fear in her eyes. ‘My performance?’

‘I brought my mother, my sister and her husband to see the play.’

She closed her eyes and smiled, and he could sense the release of tension, the relief that flowed through her in its place. He wondered at her reaction, but when she opened her eyes she was her normal self once more. ‘I saw you there, in your father’s box. How did your mother and sister find the evening?’

‘Most enjoyable.’

‘Your father did not accompany you?’

‘He did not.’ He did not expand upon it.

The breeze stroked against the fur of her hat, so that it quivered soft as down. They drove the rest of the time, speaking occasionally of nothing important, small things, and silences that were comfortable. He had never known a woman who did not try to fill them. Eventually the carriage reached the north-east Cumberland Gate. Her eyes moved to sweep over the greenery of the park and above to the sky and the sunlight. She inhaled deeply.

‘Such a fine day,’ she murmured almost to herself, ‘too often I see only evenings and nights’, and then she turned her gaze to him and smiled such a radiant warm smile. ‘Thank you for bringing me out in it.’

‘You are welcome’, and he felt his own mouth curve in response to the pleasure that lit her face.

‘Perhaps I could tempt you to a hot chocolate at Gunter’s?’ he asked as they left the park. Anything to prolong this time in her company.

‘You really have been enquiring of my vices, Lord Linwood.’ She smiled again.

And so did he.

And then the carriage turned into Park Lane and the sight there that, for Linwood, shrivelled all the sunshine of the day to darkness.

A costermonger’s barrow had overturned not far from the corner, spilling shiny red-and-green-striped apples across the road. Children swooped like starlings, chattering and grabbing and quarrelling with each other over the spoils. Linwood’s carriage was forced to stop directly outside the place he least wanted to be—the lone dark scar in the row of pale Portland-stone town houses.

Venetia stared at the charred wreckage of the burnt house, wondering if it were fate or Robert’s intervention that had brought the carriage to a halt at this very spot.

‘The Duke of Rotherham’s house,’ she said softly and the companionship that had been between her and Linwood only a moment early was ripped away, exposing it for the sham it was, even though it had felt real enough to fool her.

Linwood said nothing, but she sensed the change in him without even looking. Or perhaps the change was all in herself.

‘Apparently it was an act of arson.’ Venetia kept her voice light as if it were not a matter of such consequence of which she spoke.

‘Was it?’ All of Linwood’s reserve and caution had slotted back into place.

‘Someone must have disliked Rotherham very much indeed.’

‘So it seems.’ His expression was closed, cool, almost uninterested in the subject.

She turned her eyes to his, held his gaze with her own. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Of a fashion. My father and he ran together when they were young.’ His eyes did not so much as flicker. ‘Did you?’

She felt caught unawares by his question. She doubted any other man would have asked it of her. ‘Only a very little,’ she answered, and it was not a lie. ‘He was a patron of the theatre.’ But Rotherham had also been a lot more than that to her.

‘What was your opinion of him?’

She thought carefully. ‘He was a cold, precise man who liked things his own way, cruel in many respects, arrogant and rich, a man with too much power and yet one who did not default from his duty.’

‘Duty?’ Linwood gave a small ironic laugh.

‘He was a man of his word, to the letter,’ she said, knowing that, much as she had disliked Rotherham, she would defend him over this.

‘He was most certainly that,’ said Linwood with a hard edge to his tone as if he were referring to something specific that had happened between the two men in the past. ‘It seems that you knew Rotherham more than a little.’

Her heart gave a judder at his words. The seconds seemed too long before she found a reply. ‘Hardly,’ she said in a lazy tone she hoped hid the sudden fear coursing through her. Linwood could not know, she reassured herself. Hardly anyone knew. But it reminded her of how carefully she must tread in this game they were playing.

‘Did you like him?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Another truthful answer. ‘I tried, but I could not.’